home?”
It was, at last, the right question. An expectant hush fell over the table as Istvan’s clanfolk waited to hear what he would say. He looked around. A few of the men, he knew, had been out of the valley, but none had gone too far. They hadn’t seen what he’d seen. They hadn’t done what he’d done.
“Answer your grandfather’s brother, boy,” Alpri said, as peremptory as if Istvan were a child often or so.
“Aye, Father,” Istvan said, and turned to Betthyany. “There’s more world out there than I ever imagined, and it’s a harder world, too. But the stars. . . the stars look down on all of it, Great-uncle. I’m sure of that.”
“Well said,” his father boomed, and everybody else nodded. “And before long we’ll win this war, and everything will be fine.”
Another expectant hush. “Of course we will,” Istvan said. Then he went and got very drunk indeed. Everyone said what a hero he surely had to be.
Springtime in Jelgava carried with it the promise of summer--not the threat of summer, as was so in desert Zuwayza, but a definite assurance that, where the weather was warm now, it would be warmer later. Talsu reveled in the clear skies and the lengthening days. So did some of the Algarvian occupiers in Skrunda; northern Algarve’s climate wasn’t much different from this.
But more of the redheads in his hometown sweated and fumed and fussed as winter ebbed away. The Algarvian heartland lay in the forests of the distant south, where it was always cool and damp. Talsu didn’t understand why anyone would want to live in such weather, but a lot of King Mezentio’s men pined for it. He listened to them grumbling whenever they came into die family shop to have Traku sew their tunics and kilts.
“If they don’t care for the way things are here, they can go back where they
Darkness Descending
came from,” Traku said one evening at supper, spitting an olive pit down into his plate.
Talsu paused with a spoonful of barley mush dusted with powdered cheese halfway to his mouth. “They may not like it here, Father, but they like it a lot less in Unkerlant.” His chuckle was deliberately nasty.
“I wouldn’t want to go to Unkerlant, either,” his younger sister Ausra said, and shivered. “It’s probably still snowing there, and it hasn’t snowed in Skrunda at all for years and years.”
“There’s a difference, though,” Talsu said. “If you did go to Unkerlant, King Swemmel’s men wouldn’t want to blaze you on sight.”
“Let’s not talk about any of us going to Unkerlant,” his mother said in a firmer tone than she usually used. “When folk of Kaunian blood go to Unkerlant these days, it’s not of their own free will. And they don’t come back.”
“Now, Laitsina, let’s not borrow trouble, either,” Traku said. “Nobody knows for sure whether those rumors are true or not.” His words fell flat; he didn’t sound as if he believed them himself.
“The news sheets say they’re all a pack of lies,” Talsu observed. “But everything in the news sheets is a lie, because the redheads won’t let them tell the truth. If a liar says something is a lie, doesn’t that mean it really isn’t?”
“Well, the news sheets say we all love King Mainardo, and that’s not true,” Ausra said. “After you read that, you know you can’t trust anything else you read.” She got up from the table. “May I be excused?”
“Aye,” Laitsina said, “but aren’t you going to finish?” She pointed to Ausra’s bowl, which was still almost half full.
“No, I’ve had enough,” Ausra answered. “You can put it in the rest crate. Maybe I’ll eat it for dinner tomorrow at noontime.”
“I’ll put it away,” Talsu said, rising, too. His bowl of mush was empty; the only things on his plate were the rind from a slab of white cheese and a dozen olive pits. He could easily have finished Ausra’s portion, too, but, while he might have wanted it, he knew he didn’t need it.
“Thank you,” Laitsina said, and, in an aside to Traku, “He really has grown up.”
“It’s the time he spent in the army,” Talsu’s father answered, also in a low voice.
Traku had more faith in the Jelgavan army than Talsu did, no doubt because he’d never served in it. Talsu was convinced he would have become reasonably neat without sergeants screaming at him
